IT Management - The Industry's Web Resource. CIO. Bob Sutton. A few years back, one of my closest friends at Stanford, Steve Barley, made a comment that I still think of often “If you are what you do, then I am a sociologist.”
Steve was making a general point (drawn from sociological theory on identity) and a specific point about himself. The general point was that the behavior that people display – regardless of their intentions and the claims they make to others – are the best indicator of both their sense of self and of how others see them. The specific point was that, although Steve is an engineering professor and his doctorate is from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, because of the intellectual tools he uses day after day in his research – things like social network theory, ethnographic methods, and theories of the sociology of work and technology – he sees himself as a sociologist (and most other scholars do too).
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